> As someone completely unfamiliar with such proceedings, shouldn't locations be checked for such, well, dramatic attributes? It's depressing, but not surprisi

> As someone completely unfamiliar with such proceedings, shouldn't locations be checked for such, well, dramatic attributes? It's depressing, but not surprising. This was right after 9/11, remember, when the war in Afghanistan was just getting started. Whenever the switch gets flipped from "peacetime" to "wartime," a lot of the military's usual peacetime processes tend to fall by the wayside. Everybody's vision narrows down to just doing whatever needs to get done to win the war. There's also usually a greater willingness to accept risk to personnel, because the very definition of "risk" shifts. The people you're sending into the field are now facing the very serious risk of bad guys shooting bullets at them all day, so "this place we're billeting them might give them cancer in ten years" seems like less of a big deal than it would in peacetime. If this base was one of the only ways we could get within range to strike a blow at the Taliban, I could totally see a general deciding that it was worth exposing their soldiers to potential health risks years down the line in order to get the capability to strike that blow.